


I will come back

by BlueMoonHound



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Blood, Canon Compliant Temporary Character Death, Coping, Death, Experimental Prose, F/M, Nightmares, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide, the whole crew shows up except magnus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-26
Updated: 2018-05-26
Packaged: 2019-05-13 22:13:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14757263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlueMoonHound/pseuds/BlueMoonHound
Summary: He wakes up alone.Barry recalls not being alone, and reaches for that sensation in his half-awake state. It's like pushing through a wall, though, and he merely tumbles off the couch and onto the rough carpet, head almost banging the table. It's dark, early morning, and the ship is still as its occupants. He sits himself up with one arm and peers out past the coffee table into the yawning maw of the kitchen, the space lit only by sparse windows.There's a form on the floor.





	I will come back

**Author's Note:**

> title from it Will Come Back by Hozier.

They stumble back to the ship. Merle is wounded. Lup looks like she saw a ghost. Her hands shake.

Barry's not feeling much better.

Davenport and Lucretia are waiting for them in the living room, as relaxed as anything. Davenport springs into action as soon as he sees their injured party and whisks Merle away to the medical wing, leaving Barry and Lup to collapse on the couch.

“Taako's dead,” Lup says, curled in Barry's arms.

“Oh no,” Lucretia puts her book on the side table. “Do you-- Magnus?”

“He's dead too,” Barry rasps.

“Oh.”

The silence is heavy.

The adrenaline of their flight is starting to sap away now. They're safe here, in the ship, for the most part, and Barry's body seems to recognize that. Exhaustion settles over him like an unwelcome blanket.

Lup wiggles closer in Barry's arms, her head nestled in his shoulder. She's still shaking. Her shoulders hitch with every quiet sob. Barry leans forward till his face is buried in the fuzz of her undercut.

It's not that Taako hasn't died before. He has, a couple times. But they've been on this plane for a week, maybe, and the last two times he died in the last month, not the first.

Barry's crying, now. He can feel the air in the room like it is under his skin. Lup is warm in his arms.

 

He wakes up alone.

Barry recalls not being alone, and reaches for that sensation in his half-awake state. It's like pushing through a wall, though, and he merely tumbles off the couch and onto the rough carpet, head almost banging the table. It's dark, early morning, and the ship is still as its occupants. He sits himself up with one arm and peers out past the coffee table into the yawning maw of the kitchen, the space lit only by sparse windows.

There's a form on the floor. Just touches of blonde hair glimmer in the light, the glint of something shiny spread across the linoleum. That's Lup's hair. Last night, Taako died, he remembers, and he remembers how identical they are. Taako's body would not teleport into the kitchen. He doesn't have an undercut. He was wearing a dress, half a grin as he died, as if he forgot what death was when it took him away for good.

Not for good. Nothing is for good in this gods-forsaken time loop of an existence. Barry draws in another, shuddering breath, and stands, pushing the vivid memory of Taako's eyes to the back of his mind. Taako will be back and he'll have to look into those eyes again, and remember that he's not dead, just like he has in the past when others have died. Everyone dies. Everyone dies and dies again in the surreality of their unwitting pact with the multiverse itself. There is no choice here, only prayers.

The memory of Taako's dead body numbs him to the nature of the spectacle on the kitchen floor. Eyes closed. One hand still limply trying to grasp the handle of a knife, stabbed through the left breast. Mouth slightly open, a trickle of blood running out the corner, down over her cheek. There is so much blood on the floor. The light from the window makes the shadows cast long.

Barry casts light on the bulb hanging down from the ceiling and finds a plain brown tablecloth in the cupboard. He unfolds it and lays it in the still blood free corner of the kitchen. He lifts the corpse gently from the floor and steps over the pool beneath it, laying it on the sheet. He rearranges its hair. He gets blood in the blonde strands. Red on gold. Rich like an emperor. He's disgusted.

He doesn't bother choosing a dark color to mop up the blood. Scrubs on his knees. He can't get it all away. It's on his jeans, on his hands. His face. Elf blood tastes of iron, rich and fruity and disgusting. The water runs down the drain, diluted pink, as he rinses his washcloth a last time.

The floor isn't clean.

His hands are shaking.

Barry feels the ground hit his knees again. He knows he's in the kitchen, as his back hits a cabinet. Wood and rot and blood. The drip of a not-quite turned off faucet. Linoleum tiles against his cheek. Blood and blood and blood. Deep breaths don't come. A clock ticks, somewhere close in his mind, rubbing its cacophony against his throbbing skull.

He feels his light spell flicker out. He doesn't see it.

 

Barry's eyelids turn red like blood, like the blood in Lup's hair. He hears footsteps, and a gasp. Something crunches, noise so loud it makes him wince, or it would if he existed in his body to wince with, if he had form.

“Barry?” Barry remembers singing Alto for the middle school choir, badly, when he was a child. The voice mutters a curse. He never learned enough Italian, did he? Who was teaching him? Lucretia. It was Lucretia, tall and blonde like snow instead of gold. Lup's fingers are rougher. A hand on his face. “Barry, this is your last warning, I will slap you.”

She slaps him.

Her eyes are brown and worried, Barry notices, her lips slightly parted just the way Lup's had bee when she died. What had she been thinking? Time might speed up for her, but for the rest it will creep along all the same, cloying and viscous. Taako's gone. Lup's gone. Magnus is gone. “Lucretia.”

“Are you hurt?”

The question puzzles him. Why woud he be hurt?

She sighs, moving her arm under his body, sitting him up. Standing him up. He discovers that he has legs, that the doorway is still looming before him, dark and forbidding, and he wonders if they'll trip over another body if they leave the kitchen. The light that Lucretia made follows them out, though, and the living area is just as clean as Barry left it, when he woke. They keep walking. Every shadow watches Barry as they pass.

Lucretia helps him sit down on the toilet in the restroom, reaching for the hem of his shirt. “May I?” she asks, her voice delicate, and he nods, not sure if he has a voice. He remembers that he is real, now, at least. He's sitting on cold hard porcelain. The light spell is intensified, blinding him slightly. The shower is running, and he is shirtless, pantsless. Lucretia says something about cold water to get the blood out of his clothes. He remembers how he used to do that when his period started back on Homeworld. That must have been a while ago, because the memory is fuzzy like forgetting his glasses in the morning. He did forget his glasses. No, Lucretia put them on the countertop. They're fine. They're not crushed under his face and through the skin of his cheek like that one time.

“Sorry,” he says, coming to a little under the showerhead. “I.”

Lucretia is rubbing down his back with soap. “It's okay. I understand.”

“It's never been this early,” he whispers.

“Yeah.”

He takes the soap away from her, and cleans his body the way he cleaned the floor. Lucretia finds him new clothes.

 

Someone gives Barry a hot chocolate.

Months pass in little drips and drops and angry whirlwinds when half the people he cares about are gone. And he's been thinking about it, too, he's been thinking about following them. But he doesn't want to imagine Lucretia on the floor with her nice baby blue skirt all bloody with her hands shaking and his body behind her. It's happened before. He's read her journals. Barry devours her journals as soon as he can get his hands on them and doesn't put them down until he can return them to her. Knowing is important.

So he doesn't.

He stays out of the kitchen.

He thanks Merle for the hot chocolate. Merle is doing better now. He was doing worse for a little bit but then he started getting better and gained enough energy to heal himself up a little and everything started feeling like it might be okay. Not everything, because quite a lot of things are very not okay. Like red and gold. He hates those colors. He doesn't know how he's going to react to Taako's smile when he sees it again. It's the last thing he saw. He thinks the hot chocolate might be burning his hands but when he sips out of the mug it's not too hot.

 

It's about moving on, right?

All he can think about is that one song he heard once, it's on repeat in his head. He misses that plane a little. It was easy to live on.

 

_Don't give it a hand, offer it a soul,  
_ _Honey, make this easy.  
_ _Leave it to the land, this is what it knows.  
_ _Honey, that's how it sleeps._

 

Barry sleeps fitfully. He sleeps longer on the couch, but not better, waking up without Lup in his arms, stumbling into the kitchen and finding nothing there. He's not sure if that's better or worse, fingers gripping the cold handles of the cabinets in a vain attempt to keep himself upright. He goes back to bed with a glass of water and doesn't sleep anymore.

 

“Barry.”

Barry looks over his notes again, ignoring Merle. He was ignoring the world and enjoying it and frankly he doesn't want to deal with anyone yet. Lup's back in a month. A month. He reviews his notes. They don't know a lot about the hunger and it bugs him. (the hunger did this to them.)

“Come on. Come eat something, sit with us, _something_. She'll be back.” Merle's beard moves when he talks. Barry pretends not to notice.

“How am I supposed to go through a grieving cycle knowing she'll be back?” Barry stares at his fingernails. He needs to trim them. “Merle.”

“She just took a vacation.”

“I have nightmares about scrubbing her blood off the floor.”

“Really?” Merle laughs. “Why didn't you just prestidigitate it, anyway? I'd been meaning to ask, but you know how that gets, sometimes.”

Barry doesn't say anything. He just puts down his papers and wanders up towards the living area. Lucretia and Davenport are talking in quiet voices. Silverware clinks. Why is he so reliant on Lup? He remembers how her blood tastes again. One time they were starving and he let her drink his. They died together that cycle. Together is better than apart by so many miles Barry trips over them.

“What are you eating?”

It looks like chicken. Maybe a little too well cooked. He's not one to judge.

“Chicken,” Davenport affirms.

Barry helps himself and sits down.

They eat for a little while. Just the clink of silverware. The sound of breath. Barry thinks he can hear heartbeats. Taako can hear heartbeats, sometimes, lup can. With their big elf ears. Designed for picking up lots of sound. Back on homeworld his mother used to call elves big rabbits. He got the idea that it wasn't a very nice thing to say. He finishes eating his chicken. It sits funny in his stomach.

“You doing alright, Barry?” Lucretia asks.

Lucretia had given back his clothes 2 days after the incident, completely blood-free. Stain free. She worked some magic. It made him feel a little sick to see them so clean. He wonders if he'll ever wear those clothes again. It was awfully nice of her to wash them, though. He doesn't regret letting her do so, just. Later. Maybe later.

“Am I reliant?”

“We all are, we're sapient elvenoids.”

“You know what I mean.”

“You're allowed to miss her.”

The room feels hollow. He feels hollow. Everything is collapsing in like always, because it can't support itself with its hull.

“How am I supposed to mourn someone who is going to come back?”

 

She's whole, and hugging Taako, before Barry can even register the reset. He almost sits down on the deck of the starblaster, almost laughs. He survived. He made it to the end. He's incredulous. Amazed.

Her hair is long and gorgeous and gold.

Barry feels sick.

“Barry!” he hears, and he feels her wrap all the way around him, holding him against her chest. He doesn't stop her. Her heart is beating. Her skin is warm. He can still see the blood in her hair, even though it's not there.

“You're not bloody,” Barry says, his voice as hollow as his body.

“I'm here,” she murmurs into his shoulder.

He's not sure how much that means.

**Author's Note:**

> just needed to get this out I guess. 
> 
> I know who I am when I'm alone  
> I'm something else when I see you  
> You don't understand, you should never know  
> How easy you are to need


End file.
